Amidst all the WikiLeaks hoopla, there's also actual regular news going on. Windows 7 is barely out the door, and we're already dealing with Windows 8, which is indeed being worked on but will not arrive for at least two years. There's some rumours from an Italian website which state that the 64bit version of Windows 8 will have a completely new interface called Wind. Right.

But no
New releases of Windows always drive an upgrade cycle.
Windows 7 maybe not so much because Windows 7 is really a premium Vista service pack.

Look at a non-os related example

PC gaming for instance. Slumped.
2007 was the last great year for must upgrade graphic cards with Crysis and Oblivion 4 before that.
Now that $100 graphics cards works just fine.
You can play all games with that. I do.
Hardware partners/vendors are not happy. Studio's is developing games for Xbox's and PS3 with a PC port. Not the other way around. This games is thus designed to be played on a 256mb videocard.
High End graphics cards upgrades has become..sort of driven by foolishnes, sorry to say.
But hey it's your money.

Microsoft is trying to keep hardware vendors happy and a rumoured game from Microsoft studio is in the works to drive very high end graphics cards.

Last interview with a game development house that I read actually discussed the "pc gaming is dead" claims. This rumour gets kicked around year after year yet the game company interviewed has increased profits year over year.

"PC gaming is dead" seems more an excuse used by companies that have already decided not to produce a PC build of their latest title.

What limits "ohh, shiny!" is, at least in large part, astronomical cost of art & content creation beyond certain level of quality. Yes, procedural/etc. might be a way around this - but, funnily enough, consoles tended to use it sooner precisely because of their limited resources.

Then there's how GFX might be in the level of "good enough" for a lot of people - considering how the most popular forms of PC gaming are most likely Solitaire/Peggle/Farmville? (plus - I keep hearing "PC games are most shiny!" and "PC games, which I play, are deep"...so which one is it?) One nice side effect of mature stage in console cycle: gameplay matters.

But anyway who can argue PCs have not affected console games? It was largely (inevitable probably) a process of hybridization. Do not think those hybrids are representative of classic console games... (oh, yes, and also some developers totally skip the platform)

Don't get me wrong, I'm just occasionally a gamer.

I only play good games, on whatever platform at hand. That's how I roll.

Warhammer: Dark Omen (and Shadow of the Hornet Rat) are decently close to Myst, and were on PS1. Overall there are tons of tactical games (usually with some RPG elements) beginning mostly from the SNES era. Most of them weren't given a chance in the West, sure, but if anything that's because of the approach of the area to more serious gaming throughout most of that time.

BTW, UI paradigm revolving around pointing at things is not the only one for a strategy. Nested/scrollable menu and "jumping" between objects on the map is another.

So, you're saying that average gamer likes average games? (which are by no means the only ones) That's a shocker...

From where does this obsessions "most games must be what we, the elite, likes" come from? I'm happy with small portion (I haven't researched it, but almost certainly less than 1%) of the total - that's still enough for my lifetime (this thing I'm pretty sure of), even if limiting myself only to games already released.

I agree, they obviously done a hell of a lot of user testing in Windows 7 and a lot of the features they added were stuff that was there in either XP or Vista however they were improved over time.

e.g. Vertical tiling existed in XP and Vista and I use it a lot (SQL Server Management Studio Next to Visual Studio or the T-SQL docs). The Aero Snap (or whatever it is called) just makes it easier to tile two windows.

Also Windows grouping was done since XP, however it was rubbish until they had fixed it in 7, can't remember what it was like in Vista tbh, but I remember there being the live window priview being there.

Well, there's some differences, mainly the original explorer windows are finally gone, and the classic start menu is gone, but the rest is there.

It still uses a start menu, just different. You can have window labels displayed on the task bar, and windows don't have to be grouped. Plus, you can always use the classic Windows 9x/NT window look, instead of Aero.

Icons on the desktop, etc etc.

I currently don't have convenient access to a windows install right now, so I can't check to see how much you can have the classic explorer windows, but the essential stuff is still there.

They don't represent an idea taken to an extreme. You make it sound like they're purely to demonstrate extravagance of design.

Concept cars serve a much more real purpose: they are essentially real-life working models that internal design and focus testing say, along with a strong business case, that a particular new car design should be made as the successor.

Concept cars cost a significant amount of money so they are made only when necessary. I've heard some over 10 times the price to a consumer when finally selling the car to the public.

To conclude, the goal is to illicit a response from the world on what they (the actual customers) say, because no amount of focus groups and internal design meetings can fully predict what a customer may like.

Concept cars serve a much more real purpose: they are essentially real-life working models that internal design and focus testing say, along with a strong business case, that a particular new car design should be made as the successor.

Some are. Many, however, are purely speculative, or even artistic - there have been more than a few concept cars that look stunning, but would be impractical to produce owing to things like the lack of room for an engine.

The guys at Microsoft have started talking bad 3D-lingo with the ludicrous-hilarious Win+Tab window stack thing in Vista. Some user just had a dream and, as usual, sort of "escalated" their hopes, someone else picked up on that, amplified it, transmitted it and the cycle repeats... until what we have now. Isn't it usually the normal process by which rumors and gossip are propagated?

... has become vital for the success of a desktop or handheld system. A shiny, polished surface helps selling a product. And most men -- myself included -- are mentally still kids. We like to play. We like gimmicks.

And Microsoft Windows is no more the only player on the field. Apple's OS X and iOS, Gnome or KDE based Linux distributions and Android grow stronger and stronger. As a result Microsoft is more and more forced to also exploit the "sex sells" argument.

Wouldn't surprise me if these rumors are potentially true. Let's look at Microsoft's Operating System history.

You can pretty much assume that every other major release (otherwise non server editions) are steaming piles of crap.

Windows 95 was crap, 98 was Okay, ME was crap, 2000 was good (though many would argue this was more like a server OS and was just a stepping stone to XP), XP was Okay, Vista was Crap, and Windows 7 is Okay.

Windows 8 will most likely also be crap.

Unless they finally break the pattern like Star Trek movies did where the Even movies were awesome and the Odd numbered ones were just Okay (though I personally liked 5, most people just thought it was Shattner's big "look at me!")

Surprising how many open source operating systems are trying to go for the "older machines still work!" attitude and Microsoft is for "Hey, we require 2GB of memory to run the same amount of apps as you could with 128mb of Ram on an Amiga."

True, the Amiga uses 2mb of chip ram in the AGA based machines and then (depending on if you have accelerators or zorro slots) you can cram a whole lot more. Actually, from the specs you could actually have a GB of ram, though I'm not quite sure what the purpose of that would be, except to say "I have 1GB of ram in an Amiga."

It's really a sad day to know what computers have become. This huge unoptimized pile of crap. The hardware has been getting faster and faster because it needs to, not because we actually get any more speed for doing things.

Well, having a few MB of stack for processes (including kernel) is a good aspect of today's overpowered desktop computers, because you can say "there's more than enough, if I use it correctly I don't care". 2MB was really small in sense that software had to care a lot about stack usage, and thus limit the use of function calls as an example. This is not the case today.

Remember what Geos on Commodore 64 was able to achieve, with JUST 64 KB or RAM !

I think my kernel takes around that amount of space on a floppy before being even loaded, and it does not do a lot. So at the time, everything was probably written in hand-crafted and extremely optimized assembly, and I can only thank the gods of computing that it is no longer necessary to go this far